If you had to guess – what would you say is one of the worst things you could do to a developing fetus? Smoking cigarettes? Drinking alcohol? Heavy lifting? Falling down a flight of stairs? Sure – these are all dangerous things to do while pregnant, but another thing that you may not have considered that is actually dangerous to a developing child – ultrasounds!

What do ultrasounds do? Boiled down, they do little more than inform parents about their child’s development and rarely lead to any meaningful action. The only time an ultrasound is actually required is when safety of the child (or mother) is clearly in question and when the results of the test would require action.

Studies published in medical journals Lancet and the Canadian Medical Association Journal show that an ultrasound may affect fetal growth, resulting in babies with lower birth weight. In addition, children are twice as likely to have delayed speech development if they were examined via ultrasound as a fetus.

In 1995, a study done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that low-frequency ultrasound increases the permeability of human skin, allowing proteins to pass through more easily. Ultrasound definitely affects the body’s tissues, and especially more so to a developing and fragile fetus.

Furthermore, correlations have been shown between the number of abdominal X rays a mother had received in her lifetime and the birth of a baby with Down’s syndrome.

For example, Gofman found that in 1990, medical X rays were a causal factor in 83% of all breast cancer. In other words, chest X rays and mammograms are actually the leading cause of breast cancer! (For a safer alternative, look into thermography. Thermography measures temperature and appears to be a far more accurate way of detecting tumors as cancerous tumors are warmer than surrounding tissues.)

Modern medicine is responsible for about 90% of our exposure to radiation. And about 90% of that radiation is from diagnostic X rays. Could it be that by trying to diagnose a problem, we are actually creating a problem in that area of the body!?

X rays are performed with alarming frequency. Gofman estimates that more than half of all X rays are unnecessary. We worry a lot about nuclear radiation, but what about the smaller bursts of radiation we receive from X rays, cell phones, microwaves and the like?

Here is what I would suggest next time you go to your doctor for any reason:

Ask questions.

Ask what are the potential negative side effects instead of the potential positive effects. Many doctors downplay risks.

If your doctor interrupts you within 60 seconds of talking about your issue – get a new doctor. Every patient is different and if your doctor is going to treat you the same way he did the previous patient with X complaint, then he really isn’t treating you as the unique individual you are. Studies have shown that most doctors interrupt their patients within 16 seconds of them presenting their issue. How much can your doctor really learn about you in 16 seconds?!

Every test poses some type of risk. Remember that many medical tests are inaccurate. Always get a second opinion or testing done. In 1975, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed medical testing labs nationally and concluded that more than 25% of all tests were wrong and in some tests, the error rate was above 50%. I don’t believe that a lot has changed since then.

Too often, we rely on the ‘experts’ to tell us what to do in regards to the health of our bodies. However, they do not know YOU better than you. It’s up to you to control the health of your body and to prevent disease. Rarely do most people realize that certain aspects of medicine might harm their health, or that better alternatives might exist. When the correct choices are made, more times than not, we do not get sick. But if you do, you must take action in correcting your health as opposed to blindly following someone else’s advice.

Says Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, “The greatest danger to your health is the doctor who practices Modern Medicine.”

Get informed. Do the research. Take control of your health!

About the Author

Erin Schumacher is a health and nutrition theorist and healer, and shares her love of yoga and self-healing with her students and personal coaching clientele. Please visit her excellent website at www.ErinSchumacher.net.

This article is totally incorrect on medical X-ray exposure. The Unitied Nations agency UNSCEAR is responsible for estimating sources of exposure to the world’s population. http://www.unscear.org. For the period of 1997-2007 they estimate at world wide paverage population radiation dose of 0.62 mSv per caput from medical x-ray examinations. They estimate the average worldwide exposure from natural sources of radiation to be 2.4 mSv. Medical radiation exposure is therefore 20% of total radiation exposure on average, not 90%.

At those levels (3 mSv) of ionising radiation exposure the theoretical risk factor is miniscule (less than 0.02%). It is also worth remembering that this is a totally unproven risk factor, because the radiation dose is too small to observe any effect. By comparison approximately 25% of the population die from cancer. It is absolutely wrong, and misleading, to claim that medical radiation exposure was the single largest cause of cancer mortality.

We can easily see that this is the case if we consider location populations that have high background radiation exposure. Epidemological studies have found that the cancer mortality rates are not statistically different in areas with high natural radiation levels than areas with average or low natural radiation levels. These high background areas can have exposures up to 20 times larger than the worldwide average. Yet cancer mortality is not 20 higher in those areas and is in fact about the same as for low radiation areas. Dr Gofman might know about radiation damage at Large radiation doses, but he certainly seems to have a few gaps in his knowledge at low radiation doses.

Then there is the breast cancer screening claim. Early detection of breast cancer has saved many more lives that are theoretically put at risk from the very small radiation dose due to a mammogram. for example a 30% reduction in breast cancer death is attributed to breast cancer screening programs. 30%! is a lot larger than the very small theoretical risk from a mammogram. http://www.diagnosticimaging.com/articles/why-critics-screening-mammography-are-wrong

swoob fallina

Absolute bullshit! You need to see if your baby is deformed, in the right place etc.

Ana Cristina

Wow. Several of the comments above are disappointing! It would truly be tragic if WT becomes infiltrated by trolls. Comments like children with FAS are “demons that don’t belong on this earth” and name calling (eg calling another commenter “ignoramus”) are not useful, and detract from real discussion. The commenter that claims US heats the cell to 107 degrees is also mistaken. Ultrasound is a sound wave technology, not thermal. Regarding the content of the article, I agree we should be cautious with these relatively new technologies. However, the supporting evidence in this article is weak and outdated. Quoting outcomes of a couple studies from the ’90s without anything more recent leaves the reader unconvinced that the author is correct in claiming US is one of the worst things one can do to a fetus. That said, I wholeheartedly agree we should question the necessity of technologies that we can’t guarantee as safe. Hope to see more supporting data on the potential harms from US. Great topic!

Anonymous

Agree with your comment, but we as the patient should ask the questions.
Most of us, just assume its safe, We place total trust in the doctors,years down the line we find that many things are nor safe.

mothman777

I made the comment earlier about ultra sound flash-heating foetal tissue.

Your comment that I am mistaken is overly dismissive and not helpful to others, and is potentially dangerous in that it completely dismisses useful advice to proceed with great caution, especially when using ultrasound for lengthy periods of time, which does occur, for instance during surgery my internal bodily organs were displayed on an ultrasound monitor screen for well over half an hour, and cumulatively, if the foetus is viewed for fairly lengthy periods of time especially, there is some strong likelihood of neural damge to the developing foetus.

How much damage is done is extremely difficult to discern, and developing children that are not all there may well fall outside the boundaries of what is considered as ‘damaged’ or impaired in some way, when they might otherwise have had much greater mental ability and physical health.

It is very much a game of Russian Roulette that you are playing with the lives of your children the more you expose them to ultrasound scans.

The briefest possible exposure should be the very maximum a foetus can be exposed to, and that should provide enough evidence of viability of the foetus that is required. I take the following data from the report below;

“Kieler et al. [84] found an increased risk of subnormal intellectual performance in 18 year old men who had been exposed to ultrasound prenatally. However, they concluded that confounding socio-geographical factors meant that the ‘study failed to demonstrate a clear association between ultrasound and intellectual performance’. A different study was unable to find an association between ultrasound and schizophrenia [83].”

That some neurological change does definitly occur as a result of ultrasound exposure in the human foetus at levels of exposure commonly experienced is demonstrated conclusively by the following;

“The only finding that has been consistent over several surveys and epidemiological analyses is that of an increase in non-right handedness in boys exposed to ultrasound in utero. This was first reported by Salvesen et al. [85,86] in 8–9 year olds. These findings were replicated by Kieler et al. [87]. Meta-analysis of these studies has been conducted [54,55,88,89]. The Cochrane review did not present gender-specific data, and failed to demonstrate this association; however, the other two papers were able to confirm that one in 20 exposed male foetuses is likely to be non-right handed. The relevance of these findings is hard to gauge. Of course, being left-handed is not problematical, or abnormal in any way. However, it is an interesting question as to what has caused this, if it is indeed a real ultrasonically induced effect. This is an area that clearly would benefit from more investigation.”

The question is, what else has been changed in these children’s brains that cannot be seen very easily?

Here is what has happened to some animals, though scientists have said (and of course they probably wouldn’t say the real truth would they, when being paid to do a study to prove a certain ‘fact’ required of them?) that these results have not been duplicated in human beings, as they always do when some damage occurs in animal studies;

“The majority of in vivo studies have used ultrasound exposures more typical of therapy applications than of diagnosis. Very few researchers have used diagnostic ultrasound scanners, or fields representative of those used clinically, to expose tissues. The main difference between these applications lies in the way in which the ultrasound is delivered, with short pulses (1–10 µs duration, pulse repetition frequency approx. 20 kHz) being used for diagnosis, and tone burst (longer than 1 ms) or continuous wave being used for therapy. There is some overlap in pressure amplitudes and intensities used. In what follows, the emphasis will be placed on studies that have used exposures relevant to medical diagnosis. One of the earliest findings was that short exposures of the lungs of rodents, swine and monkeys to ultrasound could lead to peri-alveolar capillary rupture (this is often referred to as lung haemorrhage) [25–45]. The safety implications of these findings are unclear. (BULLSHIT, LUNG HAEMORRHAGE CAN LEAD TO FATALITY-MY COMMENT) Similar areas of haemorrhage have been seen where the gas-containing intestine of mouse was exposed [46]. It has also been reported that diagnostic ultrasound might reduce the number of epithelial cells in the crypts of the mouse small intestine undergoing mitosis, and significantly increase the number of apoptotic cells [47]. These effects were reported after exposure to 8 MHz B- and colour flow modes.”

“In general, there have been very few positive findings following ultrasound exposure of mammalian foetuses to ultrasound. Tarantal & Hendrickx [48,49] and Tarantal et al. [50] used a commercial real-time sector scanner to expose macaques to pulsed 7.5 MHz ultrasound. They found a short-lasting statistically significant reduction in birth weight, and some short-term changes in behaviour. However, these findings have not been convincingly replicated in human epidemiological studies (see below).”

We can see from the above that many safety tests on these machines are not even done using the right machines, which seems to me to be highly irregular, non-scientific, and possibly demonstrative of some concerted attempt to purposely arrive at results that might otherwise be somewhat different if the correct diagnostic, and not therapeutic wavelengths were used in safety testing.

Personally, I would not want my child to come out like some macaque monkey, and the effects on them are definitely proven, so why do the same deleterous effects mysteriously not then occur in very similar human foetuses?. The real answer is that they probably would be demonstrated to occur if the correct tests were done, and that these types of damage already occur in real life, but this has been covered up, most likey by stating them to be statistically insignificant, or by writing them off as being due to some other factor.

“There have been four published studies addressing potential harm to the developing foetal brain, as manifested by dyslexia, delayed speech development, impaired vision and hearing and a number of other outcomes. These involved approximately 6000 children in total [77–81]. Although two of these studies, one a case–control study and the other a cohort study, found a possible association between ultrasound exposure and dyslexia, the much larger controlled trials [79–81] found no statistically significant associations. It thus seems unlikely that the foetal brain is damaged by ultrasound exposure in utero [54].”

“Salvesen et al. [82] could find no association between school performance in 8–9 year olds (arithmetic, spelling and reading scores) and in utero ultrasound. A more recent study [83] found no statistical significance for children aged 15–16 years; although boys tended to have lower grades, this was not statistically significant.”

It seems that when some studies are done that demonstrate a definite correlation between damage to the foetus and ultrasound exposure, further studies are then done that then ‘disprove’ that, Monsanto style, or the results are just written off as insignificant, as above.

There exists enormous evidence of widespread and huge scale manipulation of scientific data in many areas of medical research to produce whatever results the so-called ‘scientists’ are paid to produce, in support of whatever commercial project they are working for, possibly also working to some political agenda, as in the case of finding out how ‘safe’ GMO’s are all the time, whilst animals become infertile, and drop dead in various parts of the world after eating GMO feed.

Chris

Drinking alcohol while pregnant is BY FAR the single worst thing a female can do to an unborn fetus. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome “victims” are nothing but predatory, obtuse, socio/psychopathic, demonic parasites to humanity. It’s EXACTLY why the bible specifically forbids it. They’re demons from hell that DO NOT belong on this earth.

Cassandra

i have my first ultra sound on Wednesday the 14th of may. shouldn’t i see if it’s an ectopic pregnancy or if the baby it’s growing in one of my filopian tubes. ithought an ultra sound was to make sure the babies where it should be to prevent future complications during birth??

You very obviously know nothing about ultrasound and medical radiation. And Gofman is a self-styled activist, not an expert.
The recommendations you are making are grossly inaccurate and misleading. People are free to choose whether or not they undergo such procedures, but they are entitled to accurate information, not rubbish written by people who lack relevant knowledge.

Shame on you for being such an ignoramus.

dimitri

That’s just shouting somebody down.

Ben Rush

It’s also true. Ultrasound commentary is pure hogwash.

mothman777

Many years ago I read an interesting Mother Jones Magazine article on the dangers of ultrasound scans of the developing foetus.

They actually flash heat foetal tissue to 107 degrees for as long as the duration of the scanner being held in position itself, which is the temperature at which cell death occurs in brain and lung tissue in the human body, leading to cell death and permanent neurological debility in the foetus and resultant developing child. Avoid the temptation to have peeks at your child in the womb with those things.